The posture (asana) for Yoga meditation should be steady, stable, and motionless, as well as comfortable, and this is the third of the eight rungs of Yoga.
Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 2.46-2.48
The means of perfecting the posture is that of relaxing or loosening of effort, and allowing attention to merge with endlessness, or the infinite.
From the attainment of that perfected posture, there arises an unassailable, unimpeded freedom from suffering due to the pairs of opposites (such as heat and cold, good and bad, or pain and pleasure).
Now while he was saying these things, [Socrates] had placed his legs upon the earth, and was in that seated position as he engaged in dialogue for the rest of the time
Plato, Phaedo, 61c
The term “grounding” is often used in spiritual teachings. But what is it exactly, and how do you do it? The simplest definition of “grounding” describes the state of being planted firmly on the earth. Imagine a flower growing in the soil. If you rip the roots out of the soil, it will not be able to grow. It is no longer grounded. Similarly, we are being ungrounded when we are not, as people say, walking our talk, or establishing what we say we want to establish, or being in the way we imagine inside our heads to be. Being grounded, in that sense, means “living in our mind or imagination.” Simply put, we are not able to be ourselves in the world. When this happens, we feel out of place, confused, constantly trying to live to please others, to win over others, or to make our place in the world. In the end, when we are ungrounded, life is tiring, hard work, and never seems to give us peace and a feeling of contentment. Happy moments seem to pass quickly, misery seems to be a guest that eagerly stays with us for the long haul.
Foundations are the beginning and source of everything in our lives. Without solid foundations, we cannot build a house that will last. Without learning the foundations of what we want to learn, like math, or science, or music, we will have a hard time going the long distance in terms of our growth and power in those areas. Foundations are the key to success, but many of us want to skip the foundations and get to the glory and the fame first. We want to seize the flowers, but don’t really want to take the time to learn about how to grow them in our own backyard. Some of us are happy enough to just buy the flowers from others who do know how to grow them, missing out in the joy of a learning process and discovery that can last lifetimes and generations.
We can understand the important role grounding has in our lives if we look at its definition in relation to electricity. Lightening will hit just about anywhere, but it will be attracted more to something that will conduct it with a positive charge. It is for this reason that lightening rod systems can protect a structure by carrying the current back to the ground instead of using the structure itself, and resulting in a fire. The lightening rod is a way to direct energy back into the earth. A grounded structure is something that contains a system that intentionally redirects energy safely into the ground.
In our society, we are taught, not to learn how to ground into our own body and planet/nature. Instead, we are taught to rely on what other people tell us to do. Government systems, corporate society, anti-corporate society want you to be dependent. Philosophies that preach that community is unity, and attention to yourself is selfishness or narcissism is a function of what I call synthetic nature: it sounds good, but the implementation is everything but natural. You are encouraged to listen to others, rather than yourself. You are encouraged to rely on experts, the media and political authoritarians. You are taught that you are too inexperienced to have a say in your own life. You are taught that you are a small speck of dust in the whole of things.
Now, when we are children, we rely on the foundations set by our parents. There are a whole host of issues that arise when parents are not able to provide solid foundations for their children, but I will leave that to another essay. All of us, regardless of our parents successes or failures, have to move out of the house and begin to build our own life based on who we are. If we do not do this, we will always be seeking others to provide foundation, direction, and structure in our lives. Living that way when you are eight is fine. Living that way when you are thirty is a dreadful. We end up in marriages that miserable; jobs that are uninspiring, and friends that are conditional. In that situation, we as adults, feel as if are victims, rather than creators of our lives.
But the truth is that, as human beings, we are conduits of energy. The highest form of energy that we can use is creative energy. Creative energy allows us to create and manifest our ideas in the world. We are natural inventors and craftsmen. We can choose to build the reality we want, as long as we remain grounded in the earth in alignment with who we are, our passions, and the direction the divine wants to take us.
In the next section, I’ll go over the general experience of being ungrounded in the world. After that, I will give an overview of how I work to ground myself.
Ungrounded: Energetic Instability
When we’re ungrounded, we experience a great deal of energetic instability. Energetic instability results in anxiety, the inability to maintain our attention or awareness. Instead, we are easily distracted, confused or lost in external demands or attractions. You see, awareness and attention is not something we can achieve through the mind. The attention we give through the mind is called “focus”, and it is the attention we give on a goal, an object, or a person. Focus consumes us. When we focus on something in our mind, we nearly become the object we are focused on. The object then becomes critical and important. Much anxiety and fear can then grow around objects of focus. We worry about losing focus, or gaining too much focus, etc. Awareness, on the other hand, is completely different. Awareness expands us in such a way that we can choose or not choose to focus on an object. Awareness always implies that we are unattached to objects, people, or outcomes. Awareness is something that comes naturally when we are grounded in presence, in the present moment. Awareness is simply the grounded presence of who are, as independent of and powerful over all objects of the mind.
But we live in a world that is completely absorbed in what I call Synthetic intelligence. Most people struggle to even understand what the self is and attempt to understand it in a synthetic way, as an object or an idea, or an experience, or an external “me”. The reason for this is similar to understanding a character in a movie. At the end of the day, it is just a character. You cannot go any deeper than its artificial construction. The motives can only be seen at a certain level. Most people are living inside not just one form of character, but are living inside multiple forms simultaneously and in different contexts and triggers. This leads to what is known as soul fragmentation, or soul fractures. I call soul fractures synthetic identity fractures. You can see that, when we do this, we are living inside a reality that is completely ungrounded in our body’s energetic system, and the earth to which we are connected.
Consider how many different things make you feel like a different person. You feel one way when you are on social media. You feel another way when you are with your mother, or your friends. You have certain reactions and patterns when it comes to your romantic relationships. You have a predictable experience when you shop for clothes, when you eat, when you try to learn something knew. Certain things and experiences can trigger emotions and thoughts. It feels as if you have a buttons and they are always ready to pressed. All of these different reactions and experiences, in a cumulative sense, make up who you think you are. But none of them, truly are who you are, not even the buttons.
Believing that you are something that you are not is the result of being ungrounded.
Being ungrounded shows up in a lack of integrity, a blockage of energy flow, internal miscommunication, defensiveness, victimization, energy depletion, lack of inspiration and strength in who you are.
What is going on here is that the energy that would normally be grounded into the earth, is being drawn out and dispersed into a synthetic realities. As you age in life, your energy is continually be utilized to feed these realities. You don’t notice because this process has become normalized to the point where no one would notice. Your natural creativity, and your natural connection to the earth is severed. The energy that would normally inspire you to be yourself, to create, to be a powerful force in the world, as powerful as any beautiful tree or animal, is being directed into the false illusory world of the Synthetic Intelligence, both in the physical through media, propaganda, and in the spiritual, through dreams and dream manipulation.
Using Creativity to become Grounded
I have had spiritual teachers tell me to imagine I was a tree, and to connect my roots to the earth. I have had teachers tell me to sit beneath and tree. All of these methods of grounding are simply imitations of grounding. They don’t work if you are not working inside some kind of awareness of who you are and creating something from that. The action of creating is a grounding of your negative energy. It is a form of release that is essential for human life on an energetic level. This is why all human beings must be given the freedom to self-express – it is detoxification, a purification, and a sacred act. It allows us to “heal”, to release from old, outdated patterns and wounds.
You can use your own imagination to ground, by looking to see what ideas/thoughts make you feel connected to the earth and the living creatures, not in order to gain approval or to be one of the gang, but in order to feel more like yourself. The best way to do this is to think about how you would be and what you would say if you know that you were loved unconditionally, and at no risk of losing that love. If you can feel that deeply, you have some sort of access to your true natural and oracular soul.
When you reach awareness of your self, you will start to see what is not yourself, you will experience the desire to ground the negative energy and release it. This is another way of saying that you will want to create either through words, paint, or some other form of creation. When you ground, you feel the release through creative art. The action of releasing must be done in this way because art is the key to creating an expression of who you are, and letting it go.
This can happen when you are awake, in the day dream of art, or it can happen at night in the night dreams. Your soul is working to help you release all the stuff that isn’t yours, that has attached to you, or has been used to fracture your soul into mental structures, trapping you in time and space.
Soul in the machine 